Before I get too deep into the entrepreneurship lessons I’ve learned over the years, I need to digress (read: vent for a minute about) into corporate America, for just a minute, as I’ve been here for all of 6 weeks now? I seriously haven’t had my third paycheck yet, and I already feel like I’m probably on some kind of watchlist… aaaaannnywaaaay… After 5 years of startup/entrepreneurial life, I just want to relish in how gloriously inefficient it all is. In the best way possible, of course. I’m certainly not denigrating corporate life. There is something inherently beautiful about the strange world of not connecting the dots, glaring inefficiencies, miscommunications, and bureaucracy that gives you more perks, better benefits and a retirement plan. I don’t know how to describe it other than a beautiful mess… So now for an anecdote.
So I’m in a “capabilities” meeting this week… But first a brief history on my capabilities background. . . Prior to working in corporate America, my only definition of “capability” was “WHAT CAN YOU DO? CAN YOU DO IT? YOU’RE CAPABLE!… IT’S YOUR CAPABILITY!”
Apparently, in corporate America, capabilities assessments are some kind of business model. Who knew?! So me being a naturally curious individual, I Google capabilities and there is a Google of information at my fingertips about the business process of capabilities. Guess what. . . I don’t read it because tl;dr and I’m a pretty quick girl, and I get the scholarly gist from what I skim and what my coworkers have told me. Lemme break it down…
Capabilities Assessment = What do I need to get my job done, matched with what can we do, matched with what’s already going on, matched with where we need to be… It’s basically a matrix. Got it.
That being said, I did some research on capabilities to get myself up to speed. It didn’t take me long before I found what seems to be the foremost capabilities thinkers in the business world. I read their papers (kinda), but I found their Twitter profiles, and anyway, now I need to tell my capabilities story…
So I’m in my weekly update meeting, and my team member has this interesting “case”… his job is to determine capabilities for the business, mind you. He brings up an instance of one group who has a specific need… after we’ve just had an entire conversation about the importance of enterprise architecture and how projects need to be more forward thinking. The interesting case he starts to talk about is for a group to create a reporting tool that pulls data from multiple different sources and creates an aggregated view in a digestible report on a regular basis. There is another project that has solved this exact problem, but for a different group…
My response, “Isn’t this exactly the same case as [we’ll call it XYZ project]?”
His answer, “no, it’s a different audience.”
Although from where I”m standing the requirements from a software perspective are exactly the same, but the inputs are different. So the end result is a report (we have multiple automated reporting tools)… and the data inputs are different (although there should probably be APIs or SDKs for what they want to accomplish)… but we have an automation team who solves these exact problems. He still deadpans in my direction and says, “but it’s a different audience.”
Well, yes, I realize it’s a different audience, and I realize the data inputs/outputs are different, but a reporting tool architecture, is a reporting tool architecture, is a reporting tool architecture… Isn’t this what capabilities is all about?! Am I wrong here?! Did I miss something?!
God bless corporate America.
I have another good story about corporate inefficiency in America…Clearly, I’m still mesmerized.